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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5298480" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's not?  Have you attended a police academy lately?  Because, so far as I know, police officers are still taught and required to use in their careers handguns, physical restraints, clubs of various sorts, and hand to hand combat.  Do you think these things and skills are unnecessary in a 'well-regulated society' or that they are no longer employed?I think we can quibble over whether the deprivation of resources and liberty constitutes torture, but I don't think you can even rationally advance an argument that incarceration doesn't inflict pain. Simply put, to refrain from the use of violence.  I will hold as definitive the definition of pacifism advanced by leading and recognized pacifists like Mohandas Gandhi.  If there is some squirrelly definition of pacifism out there that boils down to "Refraining from the use of violence unless it is absolutely necessary" or similar such qualifiers that say only some violence is immoral, then I don't find such a definition to be very useful because under such a definition virtually everyone (including me) will claim to be a pacifist.  Not many people brag of using violence that wasn't necessary, nor do I know of many that claim that all violence is morally superior to nonviolence.  So if pacifism is to mean anything at all, it must mean something different in practice than what everyone not in the category believes.  So far as I know, it is not possible to apprehend, restrain, and confine an unwilling person without resorting to some sort of violence.  I further note that its not possible to avoid using violence to restrain and confine someone who is unwilling even if they themselves are non-violent, a fact that pacifist recognize and loudly point out when they are arrested but which seems to escape their attention at other times.</blockquote>

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